Giants Acquire Gordon Beckham

7:36pm: Alex Pavlovic of CSN Bay Area tweets that the trade is now official and adds that the Giants will send minor league infielder Rich Rodriguez to the Braves in return. While it’s certainly surprising to see a player headed back to the Braves, Rodriguez spent the 2016 season, his age-22 campaign, at Class-A Advanced and batted .174/.209/.183 in 117 plate appearances.

MLB.com’s Chris Haft tweets that Nunez is expected to be out for the next two to three days, so the Giants ultimately may not lean on Beckham for more than a couple of games.

1:48pm: The Giants are “very close” to striking a deal to acquire infielder Gordon Beckham from the Braves, Henry Schulman of the San Francisco Chronicle reports on Twitter. Presumably, the move would be made to help cover for Eduardo Nunez, who is dealing with a hamstring issue.

It’s obviously rare to see trades at this stage of the season, but hardly unprecedented. Beckham, 30, would not be eligible for the San Francisco postseason roster and is a free agent after the season. But the team evidently feels that it needs a boost to its infield mix over the final six games, as it clings to a Wild Card slot.

If Nunez is out, the Giants would be left with options such as Conor Gillaspie, Ehire Adrianza, and Kelby Tomlinson at third base. Beckham isn’t exactly a premium addition — he owns only a .217/.300/.354 batting line over 273 plate appearances on the year — but promises to bolster that unit. He has been somewhat more useful against left-handed pitching, so the club will pick up some flexibility if nothing else.

I think the Padres acquired Randy Myers for the last few games in the late 90s…for some reason I recall a team in the early 2000s acquiring a starting pitcher for the last week of the season, maybe Kris Benson? Just to get them over the hump.

Yeah but if Nunez is DL’ed this guy is not postseason eligible so is a waste of a roster spot, unless he’s going to give you 6 games of serious impact. SF would be better off bringing up someone from the minors that CAN play in the postseason so they are acclimatized to the bigs for at least a little bit of time. Just cannot see what impact this guy gives SF at all for 6 games.
Also bear in mind, I *think* SF needs to make room on the 40 man roster for him for 6 games, so bringing up Arroyo makes way more sense to me.

Arroyo hasn’t played in four weeks and has never faced Major League pitching. Beckham is obviously underwhelming, but he’s a better option than having a rookie that hasn’t been in a game setting since Aug. 31 step into the box against Kershaw and Hill this weekend.

The cost of acquisition is nonexistent, and I’m sure the Giants are hopeful that Nunez will be ready to go eight days from now.

To me he’s a known, and he’s known to be below average. However with a very small sample size of 7AB’s he’s hitting .400 and .500 against Hill and Kershaw, maybe this is the reason SF grabbed him.

Arroyo is a total unknown and personally I’d have brought him up for 6 games to see what he could do. When you go from playing in minor league ballparks to a ballpark with 42,000 people, sometimes players crawl into a ball and sometimes you hit lightning in a bottle. Plus they always say that pitchers hate throwing to someone they haven’t seen before.

I just can’t see there being any upside with Beckham and cannot see Arroyo being any worse for 6 games. But Bochy is prefers players with experience over a rookie every time, to his detriment sometimes because veterans become too comfortable.

Case in point… Belt… refused to make adjustments to his swing for years. Pill comes up, sits on the bench and then eventually Bochy gives him playing time out of sheer frustration with Belt. He tears it up and guess who suddenly made adjustments to his swing after “years”? If it’s taking Bam Bam literally years to get through to a player, then he’s a not the hitting coach I want and Bochy should be backing him up by sitting the player like he eventually did.

and also w/o a postseason spot guaranteed, Beckham will help with the bat that a Christian Arroyo or Conor Gillaspie (remember facing Rich Hill and Clayton Kershaw on Friday and Saturday most likely) do not have for the coming 4 games. Also, a little research bit, of teams Beckham has 45 of more plate appearances against, he has his fifth-highest OPS against the Dodgers at .745.

there’s a few reasons why but I’ll just put that since he’s never faced MLB pitching other than in spring training and hasn’t faced any live pitching in probably over 3 weeks, that would probably enough reason for them to not bring him in

Gordon Beckham is sort of the poster child for why “tanking” in baseball is stupid strategy, right? He was the 8th overall pick one year and never did anything. The unrelated Tim Beckham went 1-1 in the draft and has been a terrible player. Meanwhile, The Angels picked a pretty good player with the 25th pick in the 2009 draft. MLB isn’t the NBA or the NFL. High draft picks don’t mean much of anything, unless Harper or Strasburg is in the draft.

“High draft picks don’t mean much of anything” that definitely used to be true. but if you look back over the last 4-5 drafts, its pretty obvious that MLB first round draft picks are catching up to the NFL or NBA in terms of player readiness and talent Top 10 picks are near prime-time ready these days. You wont see another Mike Piazza story where a guy from the 62nd round becomes a superstar, scouting is just too good these days.

I’d argue the Mets are enjoying a 30 something round draft pick in Seth Lugo and an undrafted rookie in TJ Rivera. Without Lugo, the Mets aren’t beating out SF and probably aren’t leading STL in the Wild Card. Neither will be Mike Trout or Strasburg but both are meaningful pieces to a playoff race.

Go check career WAR totals for top 1o picks vs others. There is pretty clear evidence that talent drafted in the top performs better, on average. Some people miss, but you can find exceptions for any trend.

Well It wasn’t Sleeth’s fault. He also made it to double A and was placed on the 40 man, granted he was never good in the minors, the main reason why is because he was always injured pretty badly, I think going through a TJ surgery in 2005, he couldn’t really control that. So he eventually retired after 2007

It’s actually 6/180th of his salary. Major leaguers are paid for 180 days on the season.. I’m assuming the Giants are making this deal because they’re stuck without a viable infielder for the last week. They’re not going to call up Arroyo, who hasn’t played in three weeks. Beckham is a pretty good defensive playerwho chips in a little against left-handed pitchers. I doubt the Giants are giving up anything to get him.

This move makes ZERO sense to me. Beckham isn’t going to get SF into the postseason, all he’s going to do is stop someone from the minors getting some ML experience. We can see after 273 plate appearances that he’s got a .217/.300/.354 batting line… that tells me we know what we are going to get, a well below average hitter that Bochy shouldn’t put in the lineup in the next 6 games. Maybe they consider him a plus defender to put in late in games? But if Nunez is out for more than 6 games then they need to go to minor leagues anyway, why not do it now.
I’d bring up Christian Arroyo and give the kid a shot, he might do a Matt Duffy and just blow you away.
Smells like dumb move… I guess when they announce it we’ll find out why.

It definitely isn’t a dumb move IF and I repeat IF the acquisition of Beckham helps the Giants to get past their injury problems within the final week enough that they can actually make the Post Season. Remember the Giants are NOT already guaranteed a post season berth. I get at this point of the process the Giants prefer to have major league experience instead of long term upside (in getting a prospect a cup of coffee).

At this point the Giants need to just trade Kelby Tomlinson so he can start his Major League career.
And to those of you jockeying for Christian Arroyo to get called up, they clearly don’t think he’s ready and with him not being Rule 5 eligible for one more year there’s no point in adding him to the 40-man roster just yet.

Just forget about the Giants 2016 season
The Giants 2016 season is over. Forget about trade unless that players or pitcher can help in 2017
If make wild card will get sweep first round
I guarantee at least one blown save from bullpen
And one game with no hitting lost 1-0

I know, I don’t understand why they’re so loathe to give him playing time even as a backup. Why not platoon Gillaspie and Tomlinson at third at least? What do they need a useless veteran like Beckham for a week for?

Yeah but that was Sabean making those trades. I can’t think of many acquisitions that Evans has made that have taken terrible players to SF who have excelled? Everyone I can think of has done worse. But I’d have to check, can you think of any?

I don’t understand how people can feel so strongly about this trade. It’s basically somebody giving away below average insurance. Sure, the insurance isn’t great, but it doesn’t cost you anything at all.